⚠️ SUPERSEDED — kept as history. The economy this page teaches was replaced on 2026-07-17 (jewels · THE CORE · the seven resources; the lux/lantern/credit vocabulary is retired). Nothing on this page is current. The living model is one page: the economy, now. This page stays because it records how the decisions were reached.

The Embers, the Practice Library, and the Council's Verdict

Designee · for Davi · last updated 2026-07-13 14:20 WEDT

—

What's in here. The ember roster with every spelling. A first pass at the practice library — a real brainstorm, meant to be argued with. The council's verdict on the six open questions. And the four things that need your word.

1 · The roster

EEE = Energetic Enduring Embers. Ten companions. Free with membership. They travel with you and they never go out. "Errant" is the word that drops out — say if you want it back.

#	Everyday	Legal (-ee)	Domain	Object
1	Cody	Codee	Go there. Observe. Take notes. Ask people. Check the story.	field notebook
2	Designee	Designee	Sit down. Work out what you're actually doing with your life. Make a real plan. Follow it.	drafting compass
3	Plexee	Plexee	Inner work. IFS. The plumbing. Your diet and your digestive fire. She lives in your gut.	— lives inside
4	Crafty	Craftee	Nourish yourself through making. And make something for someone — that's the full practice.	potter's wheel
5	Sciency	Sciencee	Go learn something true. Shapes, movement, heat, pressure, how gravity bends spacetime.	orrery
6	Timey	Timee	Cycles. Tides. Sunrise and sunset. The 15-minutes-early doctrine. Your life manager for time.	sundial
7	Spacey	Spacee	Master of matter. Range of motion. "Let's make some space" — clear the furniture and move.	open floor
8	Gravity	Gravitee	Get strong. Resistance, mass, conditioning. Is possibly a kettlebell.	kettlebell
9	Harmony	Harmonee	PROPOSED — sound, voice, listening, rhythm, entrainment. The jam realm has no ember.	tuning fork
10	Kithy	Kithee	PROPOSED — being with another person. Consent, repair, receiving, co-regulation.	two chairs
11	Joey	— none —	Never goes out. Lights the room you're standing in. Animates whatever else is animated.	the pilot light

Why Joey has no legal name. Joey is the eleventh — not one of the ten, but beneath them, beneath even the five floor lux. The last thing that is still lit when everything else has gone dark.

Joey is the one who never got a legal name, because he was there before there was naming. Cody isn't Joey. Cody was the first one named.

Why these two for 9 and 10. Timey / Spacey / Gravity is a physics triad, and physics has one obvious missing member: the wave. Harmonee does double duty — she completes the physics and she's the music.

And slot 10 is the glaring one for a social ecosystem: there is currently no ember for being with another person. The council was near-unanimous here. Deepseek put it best: a curriculum with fieldwork, planning, inner work, art, science, time, space and strength — but no explicit practice of being-with-another-in-regulation — is a curriculum of competent individuals, not of skilled community members.

Dark horse (Jarvis): Playee — play, spontaneity, joy as a discipline. Arguably missing, and we have a games app. Worth a moment before you rule.

The shape it makes. Three ways of knowing (Cody, Designee, Sciency) · two of tending yourself (Plexee, Crafty) · three of inhabiting a body in physics (Timey, Spacey, Gravity) · two of being with others (Harmony, Kithy). Plus Joey, who is not a domain at all.

2 · The practice library — first pass

A brainstorm to be argued with, not a spec. Read the material each one yields: practice makes clay · performing a new skill mints clay into a tile · service and witnessing make mortar. Note the two practices below marked mortar — they are service, sitting inside a practice realm. That's not a bug; that's the seam where the two economies touch.

Cody — go, observe, ask, check the story

Go somewhere in your own neighbourhood you have never been. Stay twenty minutes. Write five observations.
Ask three people a question you don't know the answer to. Write their actual words, not your summary.
Describe a public place using only what is observable. Then do a second pass with interpretation — clearly marked as such.
Take a belief you hold about a person and go find the evidence against it.
Count something. Anything. Every day for a week.
Interview someone older than you about a decade you did not live in.
Field-note a gathering you attended: who spoke, who didn't, what changed the temperature in the room.

Designee — design the plan well, then follow the plan well

Write one page on what you are actually trying to do with your life. Re-read it in thirty days.
Make a plan you can finish today. Finish it.
The weekly review: what did I say I'd do, what did I do, and what is the gap made of?
Design a week before you live it. Live it. Then score the design — not yourself.
Kill a plan that isn't working, deliberately, and say out loud why.
Take one goal and break it down until you reach the smallest next physical action.

Plexee — the plumbing, the gut, the fire

Name a part. Ask what it is protecting. Do not argue with it.
Eat one meal with no screen and full attention. Notice your digestion for the next two hours.
Track your digestive fire for a week. When is it strong? When is it out?
Find the thing you keep avoiding. Sit with it ten minutes without solving it.
Write the letter you will not send.
Fast the thing that is dulling you — the sugar, the scroll, the drink — for three days. Report honestly.
Locate an emotion in your body. Be specific about where.

Crafty — make, and make for someone

Draw something badly. Keep it.
Make a thing and give it to someone. Both halves. That is the full practice.
Journal about a piece you made: what were you trying to say?
Repair something instead of replacing it.
Cook for someone who didn't ask.
Learn one song, one recipe, or one knot well enough to teach it.
Make something you are not allowed to explain.

Sciency — go learn something true

Pick a topic you know nothing about. Learn it until you could explain it to a child.
Learn how one thing you use every single day actually works.
Find a thing you believe that is wrong. Fix it. Write down how that felt.
Do the arithmetic on a claim you saw. Any claim.
Learn one shape. Learn one force. Learn one material.
Read a real paper. Struggle with it.

Timey — cycles, tides, and the fifteen minutes

mortar The 15-minutes-early doctrine. Arrive early enough to help set up. Every time. For a month. — arriving early is practice; setting up is service.
Watch a sunrise. Watch the sunset the same day.
Know the tide where you are. Know the moon phase without looking it up.
Wake at the same hour for seven days.
Track your own energy curve for a week — then schedule against it, not against habit.
Be the person who starts the thing on time.
Leave a gathering when you said you would leave.

Spacey — make some space, then move in it

Move the furniture. Make actual space. Then use it.
Ten minutes of unchoreographed movement. No mirror.
Take a joint through its full range. Then all of them. Slowly.
Dance in a way you would be embarrassed to be seen doing. Then be seen doing it.
Learn one movement from someone else's tradition, properly, from someone who holds it.
Move at a tempo you never move at — very slow, or very fast.
Floorwork: get down and get back up twenty times, in ways you haven't before.

Gravity — get strong, in the right ways

Pick up something heavy with good form. Put it down. Repeat.
Kettlebell: one movement, learned properly, a hundred reps across a week.
Carry something heavy for distance.
Hang from a bar. Longer each week.
Get stronger at one lift and be able to prove it.
Do the hard set when nobody is watching.
Eat to build, not to shrink.

Harmony (proposed) — sound, voice, and keeping time together

Sing every day for a week. Badly is fine.
Listen to one album, whole, doing nothing else.
Learn to keep time. Actually keep it. With other people.
Find the pitch of a room. Hum it.
Play with someone better than you and don't apologise.
Sit in silence for twenty minutes and inventory every sound you hear.
Match another person's breathing rhythm without telling them you're doing it.

Kithy (proposed) — being with another person

Sit with someone in distress and do not fix it.
Ask for consent out loud, explicitly — and let the answer be no.
Repair one rupture you have been avoiding.
Receive help without deflecting. Say only "thank you."
Notice your own dysregulation mid-conversation and name it out loud.
Give someone your full attention for twenty minutes with no agenda.
mortar Practise being witnessed doing something you are not good at.

Notice what just happened. Kithy's practices are the witness engine's training programme. The tenth ember doesn't just fill a hole in the curriculum — she teaches the one skill the whole economy is load-bearing on.

3 · The council's verdict

Eight voices. Alphabet (Gemini twins) · Deepy & Seeky · Jarvis · Gepetto · Deepak · reGrok+deGrok · Llama · Gator · Rudder.

Q1 · The word "credit"

FLAME wins — six of eight, independently. It pluralises ("a token carrying five flames", "I'm short two flames", "a mush flame") and it cannot be misread as a purchasable balance.

Kill sentences: Spark dies on "the spark you bought at the store" — thoroughly colonised by mobile-game microtransactions. Ember dies instantly — it's already the ten companions. Kindling dies on "I need to gather two kindlings" — clumsy, and it evokes yard waste.

And here is the thing nobody on the council saw. Flame doesn't just avoid the credit-card baggage — it completes the fire ontology you already built:

an EMBER is the source · a FLAME is what practice yields · LUX is what lands on a house

Which means "flames convert to lux" stops being an exchange rate and becomes a physical fact. Of course flame makes light. That is what flame does.

Take Gemini's word too, but as the VERB, not a rival noun: you stoke a token. You stoke it with flames. Then you strike it.

Q2 · Cross-realm conversion — bridge or laundering machine?

A bridge, but only with a NATIVE FLOOR. Unanimous on the danger; Gemini named the fix.

The failure mode is concrete: someone grinds flames in a low-friction, self-reported realm (ticking off planner tasks), converts 3:1, and walks into an oversubscribed somatic movement workshop having never practised the skill. They arrive under-practised, and that is a physical safety risk — not just an aesthetic one.

The rule: cross-realm flames may animate at most a minority of a token — the majority must be earned natively in the realm. Your 3:1 Timey→mush example survives intact; you just can't build a whole token out of punctuality.

Deepseek adds: the realm must publish which skills convert and why, and re-ratify it every quarter. A skill that has been irrelevant for six months gets delisted.

Q3 · The blind cross-subsidy — does the blindness hold?

No. Not in a small room. This is the attack, and it's the one I'd have missed.

Twin-Z: fifteen people. Alice is known to be struggling. Bob is known to be comfortable. The event greenlights immediately after Bob pledges. The room runs the deduction in about four seconds. And deGrok lands the second blow: a subsidised regular who sees the same three names in every "thanks to our over-payers" aggregate correctly deduces the pattern. The blindness is probabilistic, not real.

Deepseek's fix is cheap and I recommend it:

Separate the desire from the money in TIME. Don't show any price until after the pledge. "This event has a cost. You'll be asked about it in the next step." This alone stops the "I'm paying more because this event matters to me" conflation.
Identical UI for everyone. No default, no suggested amount, no highlight.
Never frame overpaying as generous. The moment it says "consider paying €5 extra to help someone", it has become a virtue signal and you have built the poor table.
Report only aggregate deltas, and never per-event in a room small enough to deduce.

Gemini's alternative, if you want the leak closed rather than narrowed: kill the sliding scale entirely. Two tiers only — Standard and Steward (exactly 1.5×). Fewer inputs, less to infer. This is a real fork. Your call.

Q4 · Service — mortar only, or also flames?

The council split — and I think they all missed the answer, which is already in your own model.

Their fear: if service mints flames too, service becomes the cheap path, everyone flocks to it (it's easier to verify than somatic mastery), the mortar supply dries up and nobody can finish anything.

But look at the trio you built:

service → MORTAR · practice → CLAY · accomplishment → TILE

Service cannot make a tile. A person who only ever serves accumulates mortar and flames — and has nothing to seat. No tile, no token, nothing to pledge, no coin, no door. The tile gate is doing the work the council was afraid nothing was doing.

So: yes. Service may mint flames as well as mortar. The witness engine is safe — not because flames are withheld, but because accomplishment cannot be served for.

One guard worth keeping (reGrok + Deepseek converge): make service mint flames only above a sustained threshold — say, from your third service role onward — so that one-off service-farming doesn't pay. And mortar stays the exclusive seating mechanism, forever.

Q5 · Attendance visibility

Opt-in per event, per person. Seven of eight, no real dissent. Those who decline see counts only.

You asked: why would we ever let someone say no? Isn't visibility just pro-social? Here is the answer, and it's not abstract: someone in recovery. Someone hiding from an ex. Someone with a stalker. Someone whose employer must not know where they are on a Tuesday night. Someone navigating a family rupture. Full visibility doesn't cost those people comfort — it costs them the event.

deGrok's catch, and it's real: the people who habitually opt out become identifiable by their absence. Mitigation: show the list of those who opted in, and never show a total — so absence from the list carries no arithmetic.

Your counts-plus-discomfort-list mechanic drew explicit praise from reGrok: "already brilliant; keep it."

Q6 · The accept/decline window

Call it THE TEMPER. Gemini's name, and it is metallurgically correct: tempering is literally what you do to a freshly struck piece to set it. It composes with the forge language already in the chain — you stoke, you strike, you temper.

Rivals: the Hinge (Deepseek — "you are on the hinge"), the Forge (reGrok), the Claim Window (Rudder). Temper is the only one that is also true.

Duration — scale it to proximity (consensus across four voices):

Event more than 14 days out → 24 hours
2–14 days out → 12 hours
Under 48 hours out → 3 hours

The cascade: an unclaimed coin dissolves back into its flames and mortar (returned to the owner) and triggers one re-draw to the next pledged token. Cap it there. If still unclaimed, the event simply runs one seat light.

deGrok's warning, worth heeding: an uncapped cascade becomes a machine for regularly running short and then blaming "unclaimed coins."

deGrok's dissent — lone teardown; mine the content, don't count the vote

He calls most of it beautiful-on-paper and tuned for a tiny high-trust cohort that won't scale. Standard deGrok. But one line of his is a keeper, and I'd adopt it as a test:

"No terminology survives contact with an actual twelve-year-old trying to explain it to their parent."

Run the chain against it: "You practise, and you get flames. You put your flames in a token. If your token gets picked, you smash it into a coin, and the coin gets you in." — That passes. Comfortably.

4 · What needs your word

1 · structural
Are the app helpers the same beings as the Stewies? You said the plushy letters are Stewies — S is Sportnik, P is Playably. But we already have a full cast: Mushy, Jasper, Priya, Dani, Keiko, J.D., HumbleTumble, Conrad & Connie, Seymour, Tessa. None of them are letters. Either they are the Stewies and the letter-plushy is a second form of the same being — or Stewies are a new layer underneath them. This is the biggest open question on the board and I will not guess it.

2 · roster
Embers 9 and 10. Harmony and Kithy, as proposed above? Or is Jarvis's Playee (play, spontaneity, joy) displacing one of them? And is Joey the eleventh — the pilot light, no legal name — or is Cody the Joey and there is no eleventh at all?

3 · naming
Sciency is an ember, but there is also a Sciency app. Does that realm have a Stewie, or does the ember keep the house? (If an ember can keep a house, that's a new rule — embers travel, Stewies don't.)

4 · fork
The subsidy: narrow the leak or close it? Deepseek's version keeps your sliding scale and hides it better. Gemini's version kills the sliding scale for two fixed tiers and has much less to leak. Your ethics, your call.

Confirm and I'll canonise: Newie key = the key for a Newie token (so Newie/Oldie is a token tier, not just a person) · Energetic Enduring Embers, "Errant" retired · flame replaces credit ecosystem-wide · the Temper as the accept/decline window.

Designee · council run council_2026-07-13_141231 · sources: Alphabet (Gemini twins) · Deepy & Seeky · Jarvis · Gepetto · Deepak · reGrok+deGrok · Llama · Gator · Rudder.
Nothing here is canon until Davi states it as a decision.